Priestdaddy: A Memoir

by Patricia Lockwood

There was a girl with a black widow’s peak and a lovely froggy voice who wore larger T-shirts than the rest of us, and she sometimes sobbed uncontrollably throughout these talks, her friends leaning hard on either side of her as if trying to dive down into her heart, telling her there there with their entire bodies—because, if I have not said it, these people’s veins ran with kindness, and they wanted to do right by each other. Sometimes an adult came and prayed over her. Her father had gone to prison for sneaking into her bedroom at night while everyone else was sleeping—he was drunk, everyone said—and had been released again before we came. I did not know about it then, so I wondered why she cried. Perhaps, I thought, she felt guilty. But always, the talk would continue, about how premarital sex was like using a dirty toothbrush or drinking a cup of spit. How sex was a fire that belonged in a fireplace, but if it got out of control, it would burn the house down. How bodies, once given to each other, were never really separate again. Not often, but sometimes, the girl cried, and people gathered around her and laid their healing hands.